E032: How To Balance Brand Memorability & ROI In Your Creative Ad Strategy with David Herrmann

Summary

Podcast Summary: E032: How To Balance Brand Memorability & ROI In Your Creative Ad Strategy with David Herrmann

Podcast Information:

• Title: Marketing Operators
• Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
• Guest: David Herrmann
• Episode: E032
• Release Date: November 5, 2024

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Introduction

In episode E032 of Marketing Operators, hosts Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, and Cody Plofker welcome back their esteemed guest, David Herrmann. The episode delves deep into strategic discussions on balancing brand memorability with return on investment (ROI) within creative advertising strategies. Throughout the episode, the hosts and David explore various marketing channels, creative diversification, and the nuanced challenges of maintaining both brand presence and financial efficiency.

Guest Background

David Herrmann, recognized for his expertise in digital marketing, joins the podcast for the second time. With a robust background in media mix modeling and a keen understanding of multi-channel advertising, David brings invaluable insights into optimizing ad strategies for sustained brand growth.

Marketing Channels and Diversification

The conversation kicks off with an exploration of the evolving landscape of marketing channels as businesses approach the fourth quarter. David shares his experiences with platforms like Pinterest and Snapchat:

• Pinterest: David highlights the platform's seasonal potential, noting, “The click-through rates on seasonal keywords are just so rocket fire” (06:26). He emphasizes Pinterest as more of a top-of-funnel channel that drives long-term conversions rather than immediate direct response (DR) conversions.

• Snapchat: Contrasting Pinterest, David discusses Snapchat’s resurgence, praising its new tools tailored for direct response marketing. “We’re spending upwards of $15k to $20k a day on Snap, and it's as successful as Meta” (07:45).

He also touches upon the efficacy of Meta platforms, YouTube, TikTok, and Applovin, providing a comprehensive overview of how each channel fits into a diversified ad strategy.

Creative Strategy and Brand Memorability

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the importance of creative diversity in advertising. David and the hosts debate the balance between performance-driven ads and those aimed at building brand memorability:

• Creative Diversity: David asserts, “The job isn’t to find winning ads and scale them. It’s to have as many diverse ads in an ad set that Meta will spend on” (20:39). This approach ensures that the advertising strategy isn’t overly reliant on a single creative style, which can lead to ad fatigue and diminishing returns.

• Brand vs. Performance Ads: Cody emphasizes the necessity of running ads that not only perform well in terms of ROI but also contribute to long-term brand recognition. “There are ads that get comments and engagement but don’t necessarily drive sales. I keep them running because they’re great branding assets” (21:04).

Case Studies and Examples

The episode features practical examples illustrating the discussed strategies:

• Hexclad and Jones Road Ridge: Both brands are highlighted for their innovative use of Motion's tools to enhance creative research and analytics. David shares, “We've been using Prescient AI for media mix modeling, and it’s been a game-changer for us” (16:10).

• Ridge Wallet Campaigns: Cody discusses Ridge’s approach to creative diversification, including partnerships with personalities like Travis Barker and leveraging high-production-value content to enhance brand memorability. “We’re sponsoring people like Travis Barker to ensure our brand is remembered” (32:32).

Challenges and Solutions in Ad Performance

David and the hosts address common hurdles in maintaining both brand presence and ad performance:

• Meta’s Algorithm Limitations: David points out the challenges with Meta’s ad algorithms, noting, “It feels like you have to constantly re-train the system by introducing new creatives” (43:44). He shares his experience of optimizing CPA by switching bidding strategies, which resulted in a significant performance boost.

• Creative Fatigue: The team discusses how repetitive creatives, especially on platforms like Reels, can lead to rapid ad fatigue. “Creative diversity ensures that ads don’t burn out quickly and maintain engagement over a longer period” (20:37).

• Ad Account Management: Cody explores the intricacies of managing multiple ad accounts and pixels to cater to diverse product lines, questioning its efficacy and sharing his cautious approach to splitting ad accounts.

Future Trends and Q4 Strategies

Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, the hosts and David offer strategic advice for marketers:

• Investment in Upper Funnel Activities: David emphasizes the importance of investing in brand-building activities such as TV and YouTube, supported by robust media mix modeling tools like Prescient AI to measure their impact accurately (15:36).

• Adaptation to Platform Changes: As platforms evolve, adapting creative strategies to fit new ad formats and user consumption patterns is crucial. Connor shares Ridge’s plans to launch custom products aligned with events like the World Series, demonstrating the integration of timely campaigns with brand objectives (64:41).

• Patience and Experimentation: Both hosts advocate for patience in allowing new creative strategies to mature before evaluating their success. “You have to put yourself in the mindset of committing to experimenting versus cutting off ads prematurely” (54:23).

Notable Quotes

• David Herrmann: “The job isn’t to find winning ads and scale them. It’s to have as many diverse ads in an ad set that Meta will spend on.” (20:39)

• Cody Plofker: “If we just keep repeating the same things over and over again, you're going to get stuck.” (53:04)

• Connor Rolain: “Brands have to understand what it takes for them to win. For Ridge, it is to be a cool and memorable brand.” (35:53)

Conclusion

Episode E032 of Marketing Operators offers a comprehensive exploration of balancing brand memorability with ROI in creative ad strategies. Through insightful discussions with David Herrmann, hosts Connor, Connor, and Cody provide actionable strategies and real-world examples to help marketers navigate the complexities of multi-channel advertising. Emphasizing creative diversity, patience in experimentation, and strategic investment in brand-building activities, the episode serves as a valuable resource for marketers aiming to enhance both their brand presence and financial performance as they approach the critical Q4 period.

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Timestamp References:

• 06:26
• 07:45
• 16:10
• 20:37
• 20:39
• 21:04
• 32:32
• 43:44
• 15:36
• 54:23
• 35:53
• 53:04
• 64:41

Transcript

[Connor]

Welcome to another episode of Marketing Operators. We've got a special guest today. David Herman is back. Our first two time guest.

[Cody]

Oh, that's boring.

[Connor]

We talk. What channels are people scaling across going into Q4?

[Cody]

That's what gets me excited.

[Connor]

We talk Ad account builds Deep in the nitty gritty of Facebook media buying.

[Cody]

I'm old school. I love marketing. Everybody wants it, but no one really knows how to do it. This is maybe a dumb take, but we always talk about the same D2C brands. Why is that?

[Connor]

We all listen to the same podcast. Oh, and creative diversification and what that means for your ad account.

[Cody]

Not knocking jewelry brand there's only so many ways you can sell a necklace. Doesn't make sense for certain brands like jewelry brands.

[David Herman]

This guy's just hating on jewelry brands today.

[Connor]

Thank you for joining. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich Panel and Prescient. Motion is a company that we've all been using forever. Hexclad, Jones Road Ridge. We were all early adopters and now they're really gaining momentum. Motion just raised $30 million in their series B and a ton of new stuff is coming along with that. They've been pushing out new features. If you haven't checked them out in a while, you can book a demo and see all the new stuff that they've been shipping. But a few of the ones that really stood out to me one Creative Research and Reza was on our podcast so he talks about this a bit. They want to improve the input into the creative strategist role. So one you have Creative analytics and two their new tool Creative Research completely free where you can build swipe files from all your favorite brands. Connor, Cody and myself put together our own so you can start there and then add some creative from your favorite brands. 2motion released a new advanced analytics feature called Winning Combinations. Winning Combinations helps you instantly answer complex business questions like what ad concepts work best for specific product lines, what messaging themes are working across different influencers, what angles, hooks and concepts are working best across all ad formats. This will help you get real clarity from all your testing variables and it takes seconds to pull insights. Plus they have even bigger features cooking that they'll be releasing soon. So head to motion app.com to book a demo and when you mention the marketing operators, you'll get 50% off your first month or just start using the Creative Research tool as they are free. So an easy win for you and your team. Welcome back to another episode. We're here with special guest. Our first two time guest very Special honor. Dave Herman is hereman digital on Twitter. The man, the myth, the legend. How are you, Dave?

[Cody]

Hello. I'm well. I feel glad to be back.

[Connor]

Yeah, dude, we're stoked to have you. I did some. I was doing like my background checks, my due diligence, and what came up in my research was you recently bought a home. Everybody wants to hear about the new home, the renovation update.

[Cody]

I bought a new house. I'm one.

[Connor]

Congrats.

[Cody]

Yeah, thank you. I. It's the. It's a little bit bigger than my current house. Having two kids means you need a bigger house. And I realized that the second that second kid was born that, oh yeah, this isn't going to work. And so, yeah, I'm moving about three blocks away from my current house.

[Connor]

Good.

[Cody]

But I'm doubling my square footage. So, you know, and it's a good. I'm renovating the house. So that's what I'm doing right now. So completely gutting the place and then kind of building a building. Our sort of our dream place is what we're doing. Yeah.

[Connor]

Dream place being like lots of mounted monitors for like Facebook ads manager.

[Cody]

Yeah. Exactly what my wife wanted. It's exactly what she wanted. She wants just, you know, computer screens Everywhere because our 2 year old loves look at screens all day.

[Connor]

Right.

[Cody]

So yeah.

[David Herman]

No one knowing what, you know. Now, would you have moved earlier, before the second kid? Because I'm in the same boat right now and we're going to try to stick it out for a little bit.

[Cody]

It really. See my house, I'm in Redondo Beach, California, which is primarily houses where most of the living is upstairs, except for most of the bedrooms are downstairs. It's kind of weird how the houses are built here. Um, and so we knew we were going to move at some point because of just the way the situation was with master bedroom upstairs. Um, and it just, it. I would have, I would have probably moved before if I could have.

[David Herman]

Um.

[Cody]

Cause it's a lot more stress to do it after. But it just sort of worked out this way. So I bought my house in that really like two week window when the mortgage rates dropped. Like it, like two weeks. And that's what I scooped it up. So I don't know, kind of lucked out.

[David Herman]

Nice. Yeah, I'm. I'm thinking we're probably going to be in here for like six months after the second baby's due and then we'll, we'll try to make a move maybe six months to a year. But I love Our house, I'd rather just push it off as long as we can and have it be tight.

[Cody]

For a little bit. Yeah, yeah, you'll manage.

[Connor]

Boom. All right. Yeah. So you typically talk about marketing, but always down to talk about home interest rates, you know, planning bedrooms for multiple kids. We, we cover a lot of ground here.

[Cody]

Yes.

[Connor]

Cody, speaking of where you live, you know, I was back in New York last week. It was another east coast trip without seeing you.

[David Herman]

I'm sorry, are you going when Sean's going to be there, like next week? Are you going to be in New York or not?

[Connor]

No, no, no. And I was there to shoot with Marques Brownlee on Thursday. Last week, Sean was also there for a different reason. We were both back in New York. Sean's our CEO. Just like ships in the night though, never saw one another, so just kind of. Yeah, we've had some absurd travel going on. Next trip out, or you got to let me know when you're in la. Or I can't imagine you're coming out to Salt Lake, but we got to make it happen soon for sure.

[David Herman]

I was just in. In la, but it was a quick, brief trip.

[Connor]

Yeah. All right, cool. All right, so we, we got a lot on the docket today. I want to talk channel and creative diversification. Just kind of like evergreen topics. I would love to hit on some Q4 stuff if everything goes to plan. This episode will be coming out November 5th, so people will be on the brink of Black Friday, and maybe we'll have some quick bits of advice for them at that point. But let's jump right into it. Dave, you came on your first second time guest when you were on episode six, when we were just young podcasters, you were preaching Pinterest. Your go to channel as of late, from what I can tell is Snapchat. What's been the update there?

[Cody]

I don't really have a go to channel per se. It's really just what, you know.

[David Herman]

I.

[Cody]

Do a lot with Pinterest for a couple of brands. It works great. We've measured it with House and seen really good success with it. But on the Snapchat front, I'm finding some really good success even more than ever before. And they keep bringing out new tools that are very designed for Dr. That they had been putting off for a very long time. Value based optimizations and target costs and kind of just a lot of fun stuff that they had not ever offered before, or if they did, it's much improved. And so for a couple of brands that we work with we're spending upwards of 15 to 20k a day on Snap and it's actually just as successful as Meta. And so that's been really fun to diversify again back to another channel and Pinterest side of things. The interesting thing about Pinterest has been the seasonal approach to it, right. As we always know it's a very seasonal tool but I didn't ever really play with seasonal keywords until this year and the click through rates on this stuff is just so rocket fire. So you know, if you have a brand that's very seasonal based, if it's like a Halloween based brand and you're, you're. We weren't running Halloween based pins with Pinterest themes. Like it's, it's a, it's a sleeping giant if you can do it right. The traffic that it drives. You know the thing about Pinterest too is I think Pinterest has never done a good job of education by any means and I think that you know it's, it's just a confusing channel for people because they want to approach it like Dr. And it's not really a Dr. Channel. It's, it's more or less a top of funnel channel that can, can drive conversions but it's really like long term play and then you know, the standard TikTok shops like Everybody's kind of playing in doing it and then Meta, you know. Yeah, totally Meta. It's interesting. I saw a post I guess some that D2C index was saying that September was a bad month. But across my portfolio and a lot of us we found September to be one of the best months we've had all year. So it's kind of interesting to see what their data was compared to. What we had was September was probably on par with January in terms of success and it was mainly driven from Meta. So it was really interesting to see that. So you know, as we kind of move into October and moving into the holidays, it's still now just kind of sticking with the tried and true leveraging spends on some of these other channels. 10 to 15% of daily spend going to them and then finding things like TikTok. We pretty much cut all web ads and just moved really to TikTok shops and just letting it run GMB Max over there and it's, it's doing its job but we know that it's going to drive the, you know, the low ltv. It's just one time purchasers that are buying it and so we kind of realized that so but yeah, that's kind of the landscape right now. Yeah.

[Connor]

Cody, what is your. What does your marketing mix look like?

[David Herman]

Meta is big. I got. We'll talk about it because Dave gave me some very good feedback on X about that. So definitely chat about that. But Meta is probably like 65%, maybe 70% linear. Has been very good and Prescient really loves it. I mean Prescient says it's our most efficient channel. So that'll be like 17% of Nick's will kind of fill the funnel. Going into Black Friday we just launched a CTV test. So we're launching that with House but you know, buying that through tutorial. So not looking amazing so far but obviously you got to give it some time. We're going to go a four week test with like a four week look back. YouTube's big. I think we're probably like 15, 17% of spend on YouTube even right now. Like right. Like we talk about a lot. It's like not a click based channel. One day clicks aren't great right now. Our one day clicks are solid, are like, are very good. So pushing YouTube really hard and you know, have gotten multiple house tests with that, multiple pressure and readouts that look.

[Connor]

Really good just quickly that on YouTube. Is it largely. Is it horizontal video like in stream YouTube TV or is it. Do you get cut downs? Like what is. There's a lot of placements within YouTube.

[David Herman]

Curious what you guys do and see. But yeah, it's horizontal. We are. We'll have a separate shorts campaign which is just you know, mobile only. You know, I always mix it up 9x16s. Right. I always mix up the order but that's very little spend. I don't think it has as much of a halo effect. It seems like that's a little more like click based and it's just not usually as efficient for us as compared to like a longer form, you know. Video Action. We tested Reach. It didn't. It didn't really outperform for us so we just have room to scale up. Video Action. So that's been really, really good. Pinterest is small amount. You know, it's a few thousand a day but it's done really well. We're actually launching X again tomorrow. Did pretty well. We just kind of didn't need the additional budget. We even ran a House test that looked pretty good. We just didn't really need the additional budget and it wasn't our next best dollar. But now that we're trying to just you know, completely scale up going into holiday that's we'll get a few thousand there. Got a good, good credit there. And then Applovin. I always debating whether I want to talk about that or not. I think we had like a tracking issue so it didn't look very good in your theme. It's like as efficient as. It's actually probably our most efficient right now. Yeah, it is, it's, it's great. Um, just got it into press, looks really good. Just found out I've been bugging them every day about, about running like a Geo and they just kind of enabled it to do statewide. So I'm, I'm curious about that but yeah. Dave, are you running any Apple oven? Sounds like.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah I'm running Apple oven and it's, it's, it's the same returns that Meta is giving me and you know again like the brands that I work with on Applovin are very like gaming is one of their biggest interest targets. Like it's just, it just naturally works well but it's working for brands that I didn't think would work. And so what I've liked about it is just the diversity and the creative too. Like it's really easy just to grab what you were running on Meta and just throw it up over there and it, and it works like it's, it's, I would say like if a brand is, I don't, I don't know how many if there's still, if, if it's still a full beta with what they're doing but you know, basically like if I could scale it as quickly as I could and just throw everything in there and ignore TikTok I totally would because it's, it's just the creative just works so much easier between Meta and Applovin.

[David Herman]

Well the thing is I know you used to you know run some, some significant volumes on TikTok and we used to too. Like we're way down but even like Pinterest, we're talking about Pinterest. I don't know how much you can scale like we're only getting a few thousand spent you know their day so it's not super significant. The thing that's exciting about Applovin is like there is brand spending like near Meta amounts pretty efficient. That's exciting.

[Cody]

Yeah it's, it's, you know I think that their tool is very again it's very beta still on their self serve tool and it's, it's definitely probably in my opinion the most exciting of the social networks that are, I mean we wouldn't call it a social network but like of the sort of like doctor ad networks to play in for for 2025. So we're doing a, we're kind of breaking it in the next month and we're going to see what our level of scale can be. And we basically told them like you, you, you can spend whatever you want. Like if it's hitting this target, just keep increasing it every day. Like we're good. And so far like looking at the post purchase survey data, our AOV on these is actually like a little bit higher than we're seeing across others too. And like what we're seeing is people are buying like gifting like it's already really started. So Applovin has been a lot of fun that way. Twitter has been interesting. Twitter X, I can't call it X. It's the thing about that channel is we just took up all of our best performing statics and just launched it and the CPAs were pretty insane. I was, I was very skeptical and you know we're pausing them, we're pausing everything right as the election happens just because I just really don't want to have our apps running next to everything chaotic for those two weeks. But we are definitely adding it into the mix because they're adding just so much incentives right now to run ads there. And honestly I think like that channel specifically is since all of the major corporate companies have kind of pulled out, it's sort of like a D2C darling at this point because no one else is playing in it. Right. And so it's TEMU and us. So it's. Why not if your product makes sense for kind of male dominated industries like play in it and kind of scale it because that's what we're seeing. So. But yeah, but yeah, I'm a big fan of Applovin and I'm really excited to see what they do. I think their team is really smart that they have over there and what they've been building. So yeah.

[David Herman]

So one thing we talk about a lot on this podcast is upper Funnel investment measuring, YouTube measuring, TV measuring, you know, out of home, all that kind of good stuff. It's something that's top of mind but it's not very easy to do. Recently Jones Road turned to Prussian AI to help us as our new MMM media mix modeling tool. And we have been super impressed. No joke. It's really helped to quantify some of the things that we thought were true, some of the things that some of our tests, you know, showed us but especially TV was very hard to measure. We were spending about 10% of budget on TV and we just weren't really sure how it was doing. Boiler alert test of the week is actually looking great. It's actually looking like our most efficient channel thanks to Prussian AI. So we are in the midst of scaling it up and results look good. We are very happy with a YouTube looks great as well. You know, been been spending and scaling up YouTube a lot based on this data. So we are very happy with it. It's actually not something that we were getting. We didn't feel like we had confident data back from other MMM providers that we worked with before and so we are thrilled with some of the prescient data that we are getting. We're getting halo effects. We're actually able to see, you know, how much value are we driving directly from clicks on channel versus how much is coming through organic direct and it's quite a bit. Being able to measure TV has been really difficult until now, but it feels very accurate and it's giving us a lot of confidence. Things are volatile in D2C. We're able to build these new optimizations, these new scenarios, you know, within days. Setup was super easy, unbiased, cross channel, you know, measurement. We're not on Amazon but I know brands like Hexcloud will use it to also measure and validate, you know, spend going to Amazon and so we're thrilled, we're super happy with it. Couldn't believe how easy it was. And the team is getting a lot of value out of there. There's reason used by top brands like of course Jones Road, none other than Hexcloud, Good American Symbiotica, Timbuktu and many, many more. Mike, the co founder hits me and Connor up pretty much every day just telling them. I saw some of the new brands that signed a lot of them from, from listening to this. So we are thrilled with Prescient. It's made a huge difference so far and it's really going to help us leaning into Q4. So if you want to be like us, like Hexcloud, like Jones Road and many more, go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo and see for yourself.

[Connor]

So quickly I think, because I think there's like a bit of a common thread here. A lot of the channels we just discussed, I was asking Cody about the YouTube content because Cody's running a lot of horizontal video between linear connected TV, YouTube. It sounds like a big percentage of the budget is like horizontal. Oh Sorry, horizontal content. I don't know if that's what I said earlier. Horizontal content. We have like essentially no budget going there right now. We have a similar stack to Statics which are great for Meta and for Twitter and then short form vertical video which is like applovin snap real stories. A lot of our meta budget as well. Do you guys agree with that? It feels like there's pretty, some pretty clear buckets as far as like what content can lends itself well to performing on what channels.

[Cody]

Yeah, I would say so. I think that the interesting thing about Pinterest is the UGC creatives just do so well there. That's the one channel that we're running both branded statics and UGC video in the same ad sets and they get equal spend. The click through rates are very comparable between them and the CPAs are all both in line. But everything else, you're right on. I'm a huge creative diversity fan on Meta. I'm running every type of creative I can possibly get in an ad set just to try to. My goal is obviously always I want to get equal spend across multiple ads in an ad set. And if I can't get that, I'm pretty unhappy. And the last couple of weeks with Meta, I don't know if you guys have been kind of seeing this, but we've been seeing like meta really gravitate towards one piece of creative and a lot of these ad sets. Like it kind of feels like it broke again on delivery where it's like 10, 15k in a week behind one ad and like 15, 20 behind everything else. You're like, well what, why is it doing that this week? They fixed it this week. Like everything kind of went back and our performance kind of really reversed from the last week's issues. But in general, the more I can see the spend mix being sort of equal, if not at least two or three pieces of creative within an ad set getting spend, the better I feel because there's this, yeah, okay, the ad's getting spent, it must be the winning ad. Let's scale it. The reality is that when we see ads get similar spend, the scale of that campaign or ad set is much better than if it's just running one ad. And oftentimes what we're actually seeing, if you go into the placements and break it down, you're seeing that it's reels or it's all going to a specific placement that's just taking off. And that's when I don't like that. Right. Because it's going to burn out super fast, especially if your creative goes on reels. We see that creative usually lasts for about seven to 10 days max before you start to see things. Fatigue pretty quickly on it. And so that's kind of why when I preach creative diversity, that's really the mindset behind it is the delivery of the ads.

[David Herman]

Can I tell you what I tweeted four days ago?

[Connor]

Dude, I was going through your Twitter earlier when I was preparing for this, and I know exactly what you're going to talk about because you guys are on the same wavelength here.

[David Herman]

Not DTC dinners, not DTC SaaS or not agencies. I promise we won't talk about that. I said the job isn't to find winning ads and scale them. It's to have as many diverse ads in an ASC that meta will spend on.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[David Herman]

So it always makes me feel good when I'm on the same page as you.

[Cody]

But it's true, right? Because it's like, at the end of the day, like, there's, I guess, like, I'm very much in the camp of, yes, I'm a performance marketer, but every brand that I work with is a brand and they're trying to build a brand. And if we're just playing this game of every ad has to hit a certain roas to scale and do all this stuff. Like, there's ads that I run from different agencies that I absolutely just love the ad and I think it's a great ad and it gets comments. It just doesn't get sales. I won't turn those ads off as long as, like, our performance is good. I will keep those ads running because it's such a good story. Like, it's. They, they. You get comments on the ads. Like, there's one ad that I have running for a client that everybody always says it's, oh, this ad crushes it. Because it's always been running. It's like, no, the ad just has a ton of comments on it and it gets a lot of clicks, but the conversion rate's really bad. And we've tried, you know, tweaking it and everything. It's just the ad just drives a different type of customer into the funnel. Even though we're running it in conversion purchase campaigns, we continue to run it. And the reason why, it's just a good branding asset. And I think that we just, we're so, so focused in this industry on every ad has to do a certain thing. And I just don't think that's the reality. And in Fact, it was an interesting sort of thing in this particular ad because I think it's so good is I started looking through some of our post purchase survey data where the ad's running and we started seeing comments of the ad. People were saying, yeah, I saw that ad and I remembered it and I was like, see like it's just, I think get like we're just so focused on this data thing that it's, it just continues to just drive me nuts because it's like we're just selling ourselves short on some of this creative. And I feel bad for some of these creative agencies that are trying so hard. It's like you're trying to hit 300 or 400 on some of those creative and it's like it's not easy. Like you know, I made a shout out to Vitigro and you know, I've.

[David Herman]

Used them, we've all worked with them. Actually.

[Cody]

I think of all of the agencies out there, I have their, their, their ideas and the way they come up with concepts are just so out there that they're just incredible. Like no one is doing that, that to like that level that I've seen at the price they offer it. And this is not me trying to, I don't make too much. I just really like, I just, I, I've always been blown away by their team and what they've done because like they wowed me with a creative like last week for a brand that was just, I was rolling like it takes a lot to get me to like really laugh at an ad. And they nailed it. And it's like that was just one of their eight concepts. They gave us a month, right? And it's like, I don't know, like to me that's, that's the definition of a, of an agency that seems to understand what, what this is going for. But I bet you they lose a lot of, they probably lose a lot of clients because their ads might not perform as well out of the gate. Like, they take time maybe. I mean I don't, I'm not going to speak for them but like I imagine that's probably the case because a lot of that type of content is not going to take. It needs time to simmer and I've run ads from them for like three months and sometimes it takes like three, four or five weeks before you start to see even any success on those ads.

[Connor]

Do you think that's the way, like, because we've struggled with that a bit too, like higher quality or higher production value ads Just will not perform as well as statics or UGC or some of our more doctor stuff. And do you think it's a matter of it never performing as well? And we just have to figure out a mix that we're comfortable with, like make sure we're hitting our goals and if we're getting likes and comments and clicks on ads that aren't hitting our roas target, that's okay. Or are we just not running them for long enough? Or maybe it's some combination of.

[Cody]

I think it's a combination of both, but I think you're probably not running them long enough. I think that, you know, you guys are, you guys are an interesting one because like, you know, you, you're selling this. You know, you guys have a lot of SKUs now. But like just go back to the wallets, for example, right? Like if you create compelling content, I'll give you an example. You know, Huckberry, have you seen their, their, their series that they're running on YouTube?

[Connor]

Dirt?

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Yeah. Connor Rowland's a huge fan.

[Cody]

I love that. Like, I think that's great content. Is that going to be run as an ad? No, like that's not ad content. But I think they should be running elements of that as ads to tell their story and build that top of funnel better for discovery. And those ads are going to drive eyeballs ultimately. Right. And it's similar to I'm dating myself but in like 2005. And again, this is not has anything to do with D to C. But do you guys remember BMW with Clive Owen? So in like 2005 or it was maybe 2003 or 2002, they released a limited series that showed the BMW like 5 series basically being like this getaway car. And it was like seven episodes they paid for. It was basically a really expensive commercial. You guys need to go watch them. There it is. It is a movie. But it's all to sell this BMW. And like I still go back to the elements of marketing that D2C brands sell themselves too short on that people don't remember them if you just turn off these ads. And that's what I want to. I want people to remember us. And I don't actually care if they. I don't want them to remember me by a UGC mashup video. I want them to remember me by. Hey, you know that ad they did with the funny talking head and they were, you know, blowing things up. Like that was awesome. Like, I remember that. Yeah, right. And I think that again, I'm I'm old school. I love marketing. I don't love the data. I love marketing. And so I just get so worked up in our industry that we're just so focused always on this bottom line every day. And it's hard, it's hard to build both sides to it. And, you know, the goal is obviously to have both sides, but we're. Everybody wants it, but no one really knows how to do it. And so I'm really. That's like, been always been my goal. And more or less since kind of all the chaos with Meta started happening this year, I started really kind of taking a step back and going like, okay, performance creatives here, branding creatives here. We're going to really start to merge these things and treat them very, very differently. And then I'm going to get whoever we work with to really buy into. We're growing the brand. Here's how we're measuring it. We're measuring it through searchability on Google, through searches on TikTok. And just look at it from brand exposure. Is the brand growing? And this one brand in particular, we're the number one for the handles for the search category because we've just spent so much money on top of Funnel. And I do 100% believe that everyone can do this. They just don't know how to do it. And I think that's where the education piece has to come in on the marketing aspect of this and be willing to invest into it. Vitagrow is not cheap. There's these agencies that are not cheap, but the creative you get from them is so stellar that you're building the brand so that people are remembering you three to 12 months down the road from an ad they saw a year ago. Like, that to me is still like a critical component. You know, I don't know if you're doing that on Ridge. I haven't seen any. But, like, you know, obviously Cody, you are, because I see a lot of like those kind of assets out there.

[David Herman]

Yeah, like, kind of, kind of. To Connor's point earlier, like, I feel like certain teams are better at certain things. Like, we, we struggle with the creative diversity aspect, you know, as you can tell. And we, you know, like, it took us until now to get UGC to work, but we've had a lot of success with, you know, more produced ads. I've definitely, you know, got some thoughts and some takes about them, but I definitely think that they can perform. And bdr, I kind of think about them maybe as both. Like, I don't think some assets have to be brand or doctor like. I think sometimes you can do the same and you can tell a compelling story and be educational and get people to buy, but also be, you know, memorable to people. I mean, we don't really do much marketing for our stores. And you asked, you know, most people in our stores, how do you hear about us? And it's, I saw you on Facebook, I saw you on Instagram, you know.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[David Herman]

And I, you know, this is subjective, but I do think it doesn't have to be a 10, 80K, you know, camera. But I do think a nicer quality looking thing, you know, is going to be remembered more than something that's, you know, crappy shot on an iPhone. But yeah, we, so we, we got to a point last year where I think we plateaued a little bit and we were just like too much on Meta, too much on one style of concept. We just like got to eight figures and decent size eight figures with like one thing and I think we just needed to add another things. And you know, Meta was like, you got to do creative and like we, we've tried. We, we've definitely made a lot of progress. Like some of our top ads are not Studio, they're not Bobby anymore. But I think we just felt like for our, I felt like for our current team and our skill set, it would almost be easier for us to like go replicate what we did across other channels. So instead of trying to reach 20% more people with UGC to a younger audience, we're like, hey, let's just keep going after the older demographic. Let's find them on linear tv, let's do some direct mail, let's do things there. So that was where we went about it. Otherwise I totally agree. It's probably a largely a creative thing. Meta was just going after the same people over and over and over. I think with Studio Bobby 90 second ads, we've just reached almost everybody who's in that demographic. And we had to go to other channels where people are watching linear and they're not on Meta and YouTube, there's a ton of scale on if you can crack it. But I do think for our future getting more reach on Meta, we're talking about these other channels. Like I said, we can spend 1,000, $2,000 a day on some of these channels. If we crack a new demographic, a 30 to 40 year old demographic on Meta, there's 2 billion users on Meta. Whatever percent that is, that's like probably a bigger opportunity than any of these other channels. We're talking About.

[Connor]

Yeah, I, Yeah, I think, I think probably out of all the brands I can think of off the top of my head, Jones Road's like really high up there in terms of high quality content. That's also measured like ruthlessly from a performance standpoint. Because I struggle with this memorability point. I've heard it before, like, there's just too many examples of very memorable brands that were bad businesses. And it's like, and, and it's like, it's not as if memorability is keeping you from scaling in most instances. For Ridge, like, we'll do, you know, 150, $160 million this year or whatever in order to get to 400, 500. Of course it looks different. That's why we're doing like MKBHD partnerships. We're doing these big fixture build outs in Best Buy. We're sponsoring people like Travis Barker that I think you'd remember. Dave, right. You were like stoked on it. So it's like. So there's all sorts of ways to create memorability, but Travis Barker, horrendously unprofitable. Right. Like through. There's no way that that pencils on paper. So you have to be able to build a profitable business that scales. And then if you want to be a memorable. We talk about it with Hexcloud a little bit. Like, I think they have an opportunity to be a generational brand. You just have to invest in that differently. That's why they're doing like halftime of the NBA finals and like big splashy like linear TV buys and stuff like that. And that's super cool. But like it's for such a specific type of brand.

[Cody]

Yeah. And I agree, like, I think that, you know, does this appeal to, you know, every jewelry brand out there? Every single. Just like, you know, I mean, like, there's certain brands that I think, hey, you know what, you're here, you're going to make 25, 30 million dollars a year, which is a great business. Go all in on Dr. Just stick with it. Like that's what you're selling. Right. But I, I don't. I'm very biased and I usually say yes to working with the brands that are like, we are building a, we want to build a business and build a lifestyle here. And I was like, that's where it's fun. To me that's totally. That's what gets me excited. And not knocking jewelry brands, biting beads. I'm just saying, like a company that has. There's tons of competition out there. It's harder to break through in, like, a jewelry company than it is, you know, wallets, or I'm sorry, not wallets, but in makeup. Like, you guys, like, you're, you're like the amount of people that are doing, like, makeup. Well, there's a lot of makeup brands, but to like, break through and really cut through the noise, you have. You have somebody that is able to help sell you in that. So you kind of have a leg up there that you can really go into that next level. And it's like, not everybody has that. So it's like, in that aspect, go doctor, just stick with it. But, like, you know, we're. We're about to work with a pretty large, like, influencer creator that is like, so, like, firming that I work with that is like, we just routinely saw her pop up that she would talk about us and we're like, man, this would be great to work with. And she doesn't work with anybody. And she's like, yeah, I totally want to work with you guys. And it's like, it's one of those creators where it's like, it's a generational thing of like, hey, this is a person that can really build the brand with us. And that's the kind of level that I feel like some of these brands should start to, like, kind of try to attain to more. Is that level of like, where can we go from here? Because I don't know, I've been. Maybe it's because I've been doing this for so long, but it's like I've just come across so many brands. Like, yeah, we just run meta ads and if we turn them off, the sales just go away. It's like, oh, that's boring.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

You know, I mean, like, it's. I don't know.

[Connor]

I. I personally love it. Like, that's. It's awesome. I had this conversation a while back. We hired a. Someone on the creative team who's no longer with the business. And they came from, like, a really rich, like, legacy brand background. Like, very old heritage brands, like, fell in love with that storytelling. And. Well, my point's going to be that I actually think the best version of Ridge, and this is, this is actually what my point is, is that, like, brands have to understand what it takes for them to win. And for certain people, it is being memorable and for Ridge it is. We have to be a cool brand. The best version of Ridge is elevated. It is memorable. It is cool. Cool. I don't think Nectar Mattress thinks about themselves that way. Right? Like, I don't think they care if people even remember what mattress they bought necessarily. They, what they care about is when someone is in market for mattresses that they are, they are, they are familiar with Nectar or Dreamcloud or Sienna or whoever. Right? It's just like brute force, agnostic Dr. Marketing. And that is like, that's, that's like one of the most, that's like the largest, most profitable D2C mattress brand. And it's like, yeah, they just, it looks different winning for them versus a jewelry brand or a makeup brand or a cookware brand.

[Cody]

I. But like, I personally go, okay, like, I'm, I'm extremely online. Like, right. Like, we have to be in our space. And like, you know, I couldn't tell you any other wallet brands and that's not me having known you guys for so long. But it's like, I, I see your ads all the time. So it's like, of course I'm going to buy a Ridge wallet, because that's the only thing I know for a wallet. Someone like, hey, I need a wallet. I'm just going to buy a Ridge wallet, right? It's like, I'm going to buy Hexclad. I know who our place is, I know who all these things are, but I'm just blasted with Hexclad. And so the reality is, is that, you know, however you look at it from that point of view, it's like marketing is working. It's working the way you're supposed to. And the doctor aspect of it is still branding. It is. And I think I want to make that point clear. Like, you're still doing it. It's just that it's a different approach. Where I'm always thinking about it is I, like, memorable to make people like really stop and consume my content for longer than three seconds. Like, that's what I want, right? I want them to watch it, consume it, have fun, take a moment to just consume this piece of content. And I think that it's very hard to get everyone to buy into that, you know, across the spectrum, because it doesn't make sense for certain brands. Like, like I was saying with like jewelry brands or, you know, I don't.

[David Herman]

Know, this guy's just hating on jewelry brands today.

[Cody]

No, I, I've worked, I've worked with a lot of jewelry brands and I, everyone I work with, it's great. Like they do great business. But it's so hard to cut through the noise because there's just so many jewelry brands out There what is your value prop? Your value prop is your offer that's really the value prop for jewelry. It's right, because it's like there's only so many ways you can sell a necklace. Like it's a design, right. So it's the same with fashion. Like there's so many fashion brands that they're what stands out. You're going to buy it based on usually the offer that you get. And so I just go from that perspective of like, you know, just making memorable ads is really easy to talk about, but actually doing it in practice is something that I would love to see more D2C brands take a swing at and be willing to kind of go that route. Because I think we're also in this world where I was thinking about this last weekend was of all like, we always talk about the same D2C brands. Why is that? Like we do like, if you're like, okay, here's the success stories, right, because.

[Connor]

We all, we all listen to the same podcast.

[David Herman]

Yeah, pretty much.

[Connor]

Well.

[Cody]

But yes, the success of, of this era is, is you guys, because you're talked about. But like what I'm saying is like in D2C there's like a select 10 to 15 brands that people say are the success stories of D2C. Right. There hasn't been any of those in a quite a while that have really stood out the test of time. And why is that? Is it because we're too driven by a one day click roas or is it because people aren't willing to take the bets anymore because the economy turned and people didn't have the money they did? Or is there is like, what is it? I don't, I don't know the answer to that, but I'm always kind of stuck on thinking about like, man, you know, I was in this space, you know, 2012, 2013 and a lot of those other brands were getting started and you saw allbirds come up and you saw Purple Mattress come up in all these brands that are all kind of now struggling. And it's like, okay, they got to be so big, which wasn't the answer. But I think there's this, I like to, I like to call it quiet scaling, where essentially you're doing branding and you're building the brand, but you're not doing it as aggressive. You're just doing it in the way that makes sense. And that's kind of how I like to do it. It's, it's like, hey, let's, let's spend 8, 8 to 10% of our total daily spend on reaching frequency campaigns with really good commercials. And let's run them across Facebook, top feed on TikTok and then YouTube, top of funnel. And we'll just run those. We will never shut those off. We will take that out of our daily goals. That's just that lives independently over here and you know, just be running that constantly run it to like the right landing pages and really don't even think about it for a while. Just let it run, let it simmer and then start to measure it after 30, 60, 90 days and see, hey, are we seeing success? Is the, is the voice. Is the share of voice increasing on organic? And that's a metric that I love to monitor, is organic versus paid percentage of traffic every day. And if my percentage of traffic for organic is continuing to kind of climb slowly, I feel like, okay, things are moving the right direction, that people are starting to talk about us more. Right. And that's kind of how I look at things. So. Yeah, sorry, that was a long tangent.

[David Herman]

No, no, you're good. I'm going to ask a super tactical question. So obviously you run the stuff in Reach and Video View and frequency campaigns. Do you also run, you know, let's just say video because we're talking about them. Do you run them in purchase optimized campaigns as well?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, I do. Usually what I like to do is I will start them there and then the ones that seem to get the best, you know, engagement on them from a purchase campaign, I will rotate those to a reaching frequency campaign because I'm like, okay, there's something about this ad that feels like it's hitting the right audience of what we're trying to go for. And then usually, you know, we'll keep trying to make the other ones work, whether it's iterations or something like that. But that's typically the tactic I like to go through to make those work is I want to, I always want to verify them with a purchase audience because ultimately that's, that is still our goal is to drive sales. And so if they can drive even a point, you know, a point five, I'm like, okay, there's something here where these are, these look really strong. Like they're, they're selling enough to justify scaling them into, into something else that makes sense.

[David Herman]

Who switches a massive software that their company uses right before Black Friday? Well, we did. Jonesboro just switched to Rich panel and we are thrilled about it. Why did we make the switch? Well, first of all, we recently learned that Ridge did it. Connor told me how much they're loving it. And we also just wanted to make sure that our customer support team had everything they needed to have a successful Black Friday. We had a lot of issues last year just overall with CX and so I wanted our team to be ready beforehand because we're gonna have crazy volumes. But I also didn't want to have to hire extra help with Rich panels. AI it's a game changer. Since switching, our team has been way more productive, way more efficient. Our ticket volumes are up, but we're getting through tickets a lot quicker. So our response times are actually way down, ultimately improving our CSET scores. And so you know, I normally wouldn't recommend switching to a new software right before Black Friday, but it worked out for us. The Rich panel team made it super easy. I held our hands every step of the way and it just couldn't have been an easier transition. So bottom line, your team will be faster, your customers will be happier and you'll also save a lot on SaaS costs. Now if you are considering switching your help desk Rich panel, they offer free weekly 40 minute webinars that are designed to help your CX team and your CX lead understand the platform, see how it's different, understand what migration looks like and get support during and after migration. So head over to richpanel.com check out their weekly webinar schedule and get your team in on a session so you can get ready before Black Friday. So one thing, one thing you were saying to me because I think the creative diversity is always fascinating and even like the media buying and you know, meta system aspects of it, you were kind of saying that like when you get started with that, you're not going to get great performance at the get go. I'm assuming, you know, you think meta just thinks it's optimized towards a certain audience and it needs some time. You know, tactically are you, are you splitting them out or are you trying to like force spend to things and just putting like new creatives on like a lower budget own campaign just to kind of like let it get some time to learn.

[Cody]

So I usually will. If it's a net new concept or net new idea, I'm going to give it usually a two week window versus a one week window that I typically like to give everything else on if I'm. If my goal of that is a purchase conversion, right? And I go all right. Sometimes I feel like, especially if you're running so heavy into, you know, UGC mashups In order for the system to kind of like pick up and go with something new, you're essentially retraining it in a way, right? It's like the way that I look at Meta and maybe this is a terrible analogy, but I'm just going to go with it because I think it makes sense is say, for example, you have your own Chat GPT right here. No one else is feeding it data, it's only you, right? So if you have always fed it a word that you've spelled wrong, say it's the. The word the. You spell it T, E, H and you're like, I always spell it this way. I'm only going to do it this way. And then one day you go in there and you ask chatgpt, hey, how do you spell the word the? It's probably going to spell it T H because it's only getting data from you. And the way that I look at it is in your Meta AD account, you're competing against yourself in the algo for your creative. So if you're always feeding it one style creative, if you try to bring in and introduce something else, it's going to go, wait, hold up, this isn't something I'm used to. I need to think about this now in context. Like that's what I've seen play out since essentially January, February, March in the system is that it will actively reject it until you give it enough time to learn and grow. And maybe that's a terrible analogy, but that's kind of the way that I've sort of looked at it since Meta's really pushed the AI esque stuff. It's that how do I consistently screw it up to the point where it's learning so many new things constantly. And if Meta keeps talking about this creative diversity thing, my thought is they're telling us this for a variety of reasons, but it's probably because their algo does better when you're constantly feeding it new, new, new versus the same thing that you know what, there might be a better opportunity out there with a better style creative. You just don't know because you're stuck with this one and you're telling Meta essentially the wrong information. And most importantly, and I actually, I had a little incident, not incident, but sort of brain. My mind was a little bit blown. So I have a client that yes, is all has always been on manual bids. It has to be because the brand is, the margin is just not there. But they have budget so we run every one of their SKUs on these manual Bids. And what happened is, is that over time, I started to see this, the CPA naturally graduate, gravitate up, up, up. And what I learned was I was training the manual bid to always go after a customer at that price point. So the system was locked in. And the way that I measured is I opened it up, bid multipliers, and pull in the access token. I see, hey, how is this bid? And it's like it was stuck at this $32 CPA. And I'm like, okay, if I retrain the system by throwing it back into lowest cost, do you think it would work? So what I did was I literally turned off all the ads. I turned it back on lowest cost. I said, tell the client, hey, let's just see if this works. Instantly. $21. And at the same level of spend, it held for 14 days. At that level of spend, our return on ad spend essentially doubled. And then what we did was we turned the manual bids back on at the same bid that they were set at, and all of them got down to a 20, down to what the CPA was, and they were spending the full amount. It was almost like I had to kick this system into gear to get it back into what I was really needing it to do, but it needed a little bit other data to get there. And that's what's. Something that I've been playing around with in Meta is just I don't take what they're giving me at face value. I always try to, like, break it, however it can be, because I just feel like these systems get stuck into this, into this. Like they know, oh, yeah, I know who your audience is. Well, maybe, yes, you're the smartest person in the room, but maybe it's. I'm giving you the wrong information constantly and I need to. I need to rephrase, reframe you to push into a better position. It's like the context, in a way.

[Connor]

Do you. Let me ask you a question on this one. Yeah. Because I totally agree. Like, and we've done a number of things that I could talk about in a second, but. Well, I'll show my hand here a little bit. Right. We went from just acquiring wallets to your point. We went a long time, like, just the same standard, 12 wallets, same prices, long time. Meta got really good at that. We launched rings, we launched travel. We've launched like dozens, hundreds of new colorways. And structurally, I felt like we've had to set up Meta differently in order to support that level of nuance. Meta seems incredibly good at doing the one thing that you ask it to do, like you just mentioned, so good in fact it will just get stuck doing it. So for a brand like mine, or maybe you have other examples like does that structure look different across different margin profiles, different price points, different products, different consumers, what does that look like?

[Cody]

Yeah, so, and I think I know where you're going to go with this on your topic, but I am starting to realize that if you, especially with a brand that has multiple SKUs that are appealing to different audiences. Right. Meta does not do a good job in my opinion of sourcing in the same ad account. Even if your creatives are diverse and everything, it seems like the system, just the ad account level data, somehow some way is still driving it to the user that it thinks it knows for the even if it's a completely different product. And so one of the things that I've been trying to do is, and this is actually something new, is one of two things. One is, hey, let's just create another ad account, create a browser based pixel and just go that route, right? There's a lot of downsides with that because you're not running capi, you're not able to do a lot of things that you're able to do in the bau. And so one element that I am more and more intrigued by is actually starting to really go back to things like, you know, the interests and the lookalikes and really just hone in on an audience to say, I need to just push this to someone that I know is going to buy this that's completely different and actually start excluding things. So case in point, with this brand that I mentioned, we come out with new products all the time. They never work in the ad account. It's just the three that it's the three main ones that we always spend against. So I started going, okay, this is going after, you know, in this case, pregnancy and postpartum, you know, postpartum women. And so I go, all right, I kind of can fit that profile. I'm going to build a lookalike off of this hero products ads and I'm going to add in these layers of interest and I'm going to exclude these types. And I was like, meadows, like this is super defined. I said, the point is I want to train the system. I don't care if my CPA is way too high, I just want to train the system. And so I let it run lowest cost, just let it learn. And it was a bunch of ads. That thing's been running for 35 days this week we are hitting a 2x roas on it and the audience is like net new. It's like 80% new visitors. It just like literally over a weekend it flipped and now it's like it's scaling and working and I'm looking at it and the customers are like, it's all new people that are not in our base that are finding this product. And I'm like, okay, it took about 30ish days to get there and it got there. Was it because I limited the audience as far or was it just hey, I gave it 35 days and eventually it worked. I don't know but I kind of think like you just gotta train these systems a certain way. And I'm curious your guys thoughts on the multiple ad account thing because I've tried it and I'm just, I'm always weary of it. Because you're just running browser based.

[Connor]

Yeah. So let me just say quickly because this comes up a lot. We technically have a separate ad account. Separate pixel for rings works for us. We don't have capi. We understand there's a bunch of trade offs. We fire the browser pixel conditionally based on ring events because we've tried to like make it as singular of a, of a kind of journey as possible. Would not recommend it. People ask me that all the time. Like I. It is not the starting place. It's not like the silver bullet that you need to scale your business. So actually we don't need to talk about that too much. I was just curious like what would you do from a single ad account, single pixel to do that? I think you hit a lot of those points.

[Cody]

Yeah. And I think the other element of it is it's, you know, we became so used to just running broad, broad, broad, broad, broad. Right. And I think there's still relevance in specific audiences with running lookalikes and interests that still seem to work. And we can't be afraid to go and be testing these things to push them in a certain way. And every month I've just. My whole thing is every month I'm like, I don't want to do what I did last month. I want to always try to break something and do something slightly different than I did last month. And is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? I don't know. It's more or less. I just, I try to fight boredom. So you know.

[David Herman]

But yeah, I also think just like I think the interesting makes a lot of sense. I, I don't know. The Right way. I've talked to a lot of people though, that have tried creative diversity and definitely feeling like the. Their system is just optimized towards what's currently working. But I also just think the time and patience aspect, like, yeah, I don't know if most people are going to be patient enough and I probably not either in the past until hearing this. Patient enough to let things run for 30 days without great performance and just let it get some time to get some data.

[Cody]

Yeah, and it's, it's the patience, I think. And this whole thing too. It is patience.

[Connor]

I totally patience around, like net new ideas and concepts. Like when we typically, when we do the higher production shoots, it's like we almost say like, hey, we need to, let's just spend 50 grand on this. Let's just, let's just figure this out. Let's spend time. We did a, we did a big Sean O'Malley. We got AD rights to his content. We got a bunch of organic posts. It was really cool. But we got that content didn't work immediately. From a doctor perspective, we're like, hey guys, we just need to flesh this out. Let's just commit to trying to experiment further here. And I think that's what it takes when it's new products, new creative, any of that. It's like you have to put yourself in the mindset of just committing to experimenting versus, hey, I'm going to run the same broad conversion optimized campaign with this creative. If it doesn't work after three days, I'm going to turn it off. You'll never find new ways.

[Cody]

You'll never find, you'll never find. And I think that, you know, as people are starting to plan for 2025 in the future, I really encourage brands to have a test budget that's just there for your cre, your teams, because that's where the magic is going to happen. It's. If you just keep repeating the same things over and over again, you're going to get stuck. And I see that way too often. And I helped a friend's brand just unstick his brand. He was just stuck. And I was like, because you're doing the same thing you were doing three years ago. Nothing's changed. And I'm like, you're hitting the same people. And I was like, do this instead. And he did. And he texted me on the weekend. He's like, you unlock something. I'm like, yeah, because you train, you, you push the system into forcing it to learn something net new. Like, oftentimes if performance sucks, I would like to actually go in and I will actually like set up like exclusions to the max on like lookalikes, adding exclusions in and just like go all in on trying to force the system away from anyone. That's somewhat semblance of your audience to try to force it some other direction because it just, I just feel like that's, that's more or less like kind of what happens with these things. Like if there's, if there's a, if there's a Facebook delivery issue, you typically see bad performance for a couple of days after because the system has to reset. Right. And it's the same theory with bad performance on ads. It's that if you get stuck in this like doom loop, you have to find a way to get out of it. And the only way to get out of it is either A, shut the ads off and rebuild them from scratch, or B, try to directionally something, a campaign of some sort in a different direction. Because ultimately what we see is that helps the entire ad account. Right. One good ad can fix an entire down ad account instantly. And then you're back on, you're back into it. And that's how I kind of look at things is like it's, it's always like the lesser of two evils. I don't want to kill everything because I don't want to reset everything. But at the same time, sometimes like post holidays and stuff, your system is so stuck on this other thing that you have to reframe it again.

[Connor]

So totally.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[David Herman]

Speaking of doing new things, one of the reasons we wanted to have you on your tweeting about like feed versus reels. I think one of the things that advertisers get stuck in is doing what worked a few years ago, which was feed based advertising.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[David Herman]

And obviously there's reels based advertising. Can you talk a little bit about that and why you think that's so important?

[Cody]

Well, yeah, so the way they look at it is this, is that if you go look at, if you go scroll through your reels, mine's mostly memes, but if you go look through reels, right. There's a very certain kind of content that you see. Right. It feels like there might be a somebody responding to a comment and a sticker or this like very native text, a certain kind of way that feels very much like the reels slash TikTok branded stuff. It's, it's very like if you look at a piece of creative that feels like it's going to be there 99% of the time it's going to be there and that's where it's going to. You're going to get a bulk of the spend. I have not seen anywhere where Meta has delivered over 50% reels. Only time I see that is usually on the reply to type sticker ads. That's usually the only time where I see it go to 60, 70% reels. But most of the time it kind of hovers in that 30, 40%. But the element of it is, hey, is there a world in which we are treating these platforms and these feeds entirely the same and they should not be? And I think that's the case. And so one of the things that I've been trying, and again it's still a work in progress, has been running different ads, the same concept, just slightly different tweaks where the feed ads act a little bit slower on edits than the reels and stories ads because it's kind of two different audience consumptions and going like, okay, I don't want to, I want to run auto placements, but if I can change the customization of the ads, do I see success? And I have actually seen it work pretty well. So what I did was, and this is something where it's more or less statics, where I'll launch static ads for the feed placements and then I'll grab, I'll make the same ad but I'll add slight movement to the text and I'll add little bits of music, not Facebook's music, but just some other music. And I'll just change it just slightly so that when it's on reels or stories, there's just a visual component. And when I did this test, what I found was is that the, the BAU versus the test, the one where it's just all statics and the one where it was static and then real style, the placement mix was a lot more even on that than just the static. The static was like it's all feeds, right? And I was like, okay, now that, that got me thinking, I was like, can I take that next step with actual video content? And so now that the theory is is that can I run kind of like that slower paced video ad feed? It's the same ad, it's just slightly edited differently and make that tweak. And that's kind of where I'm at right now is like it's kind of playing with and like the results are mixed. Like it's not great yet, but like I'm still convinced that reels is an entertainment channel before a performance channel. It's very much more like TikTok than anything else. And we're stuck. And meta, meta buyers are stuck trying to get this thing to work when in reality, you know, people don't run TikTok ads because they TikTok ads, quote unquote, don't work. It's because it's just, it's a different audience consumption. It's a different entertainment. Stories and feeds work because the audience is used to it. It's. You're scrolling your friends feeds and your brand's feeds one way or the other. So you're scrolling like this or like this. But the total screen reels and TikTok style, they lock you into their platform. You're stuck, right? And so you don't want to leave it because it's full screen. So that's why I'm like, how do you get that content differently? And personally I think, and this is maybe a dumb take, but I've always thought that reels placement should not have been part of the doctor placements, but they should have reserved it for things like reaching frequency and top of funnel and go a different route. Obviously they care about money, whatever. But like from a doctor advertiser, typically what we see is the real CPAs are a lot higher than feeds and stories. And I've not found brands where it's been better. And so I'm curious to you guys, do you guys see that in your channel makeup, the placements? Do you see reels being a lot higher CPAs?

[Connor]

I'll take this one first. Totally higher CPAs. I mean, look, I think reels is a lot like shorts, a lot like TikTok, a lot like snap, like it's, it's full screen, short form, vertical video, people are consuming it at a really high rate. And all of those are measured differently, right? Like, I don't measure YouTube shorts the same way I do the Instagram feed. So I completely agree that it's silly to hold reels or Facebook stories to the same performance standards as a feed. I don't necessarily think they don't work from a doctor perspective. I just think they have to be measured differently. And that's like a super soft science. If I'm meta, I'm probably building more tools to do holdout tests for that placement differently so that we can measure the incremental impact of that. Because if it's coming at a lower cpm, if it's entertaining content, if you're serving more views to your point if it's memorable content like you could be creating a lot of value that's just not measured on the, you know, seven day click, one day view that you know, most advertisers are using.

[Cody]

Yeah, and that's the way I look at it too. I mean it's, it's, it's tough and I think, but I do think that's part of the problem that has been happening this year is I think meta really tweaked it and the algo really pushed towards that because that's where daily active users are and they needed a place to control CPMs and it's, it's been a culprit for a lot of the brands that I work with. That's the first thing I do when I come into audit brands is I go how much is your placement on, on reels? And then a do we bring in bid multipliers to down bid those as a test or do we just eliminate reels altogether? And you know, some brands the bid multiplier way works and others, you know, I've not found eliminating it in auto placements. I feel like that never seems to work, but I don't know, that is a big thing that I encourage brands to kind of look through and get on a pathway of going like, hey, if you're, if you're stuck doing statics and you're complaining because Facebook suddenly stopped working, look at your channel mix and make sure. Because if you look at static ads and if you get a static ad when you're scrolling reels, you're going past it so fast. It's so, it's so awkward. Like it's just this like in your face, like complete. You know what I mean? Like it feels bad, right? And so, you know, sometimes that's where I think like trusting the meta algorithm isn't always the best because you know it's going to do what it's going to do.

[Connor]

But yeah, Cody, what's your take?

[David Herman]

Yeah, I agree with that. I was actually just looking at our, our split. We have a pretty similar CPA actually, which I'm surprised by. But we don't spend as much there as I think we would like. And so often when we are focusing on creative diversity, it'll be with more of like a UGC real style. And one of the insights we look for, you know, in addition to the age breakdown is we will look at the placement breakdown and always happy to see when, when we're getting reels. Usually that coincides with a higher percent of new visit but yeah, I agree. I think the challenge. We even tested a attribution window test with Meta and try to add an add on some views to our normal ones, thinking, hey, reels is a little bit more of a Discovery Channel and then they might go search. So maybe like Connor said, it does drive Dr. But they're just not clicking. It's more of a little bit of a view based. We didn't. We didn't find that work. We didn't really find a shift to Reels at all. But I think, I think just for us, trying to be more mindful of, you know, even if we have a product launch, like not just doing your standard doctor Statics or our studio videos at our feed, like trying to take the same offer, the same messaging propositions, but then how can we kind of display that in all of the different ad units to get the most inventory possible?

[Connor]

Yep, totally. All right, I've got. I've got one more key question for you. As I mentioned this. This podcast probably coming out November 5th. If there were to be a game seven, it would be November 2nd. So when this comes out, World Series is over. What's. What's happening? What do you think? Dodgers in how many Dodgers and six. Dodgers and six. All right, let's go. We're. I hope you're right. We're super stoked. We launched MLB this year. This is the most commercially potent World Series possible. Dodgers, Yankees. Yeah. And we're prepping all. We're prepping two versions right now, two emails, bunch of ads. So we're ready to go with whoever wins the World Series. We're gonna, we're gonna get things to scale.

[Cody]

So are you doing anything, Are you doing anything fun like the, the. Whatever. The. The corgi throwing the ball into the basket and have you seen those videos?

[Connor]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Cody]

Predicting the, like, do anything like that on the social front would be fun. I think there's a lot you could do with it.

[Connor]

We've got some cool social plans. Our organic content I think is really strong. Um, and then we've got the. We've. This will come out after so people will know we get the rights to, like, World Series champion New York Yankees, like Emblem. So actually have, like, custom products launching the moment that whoever wins, wins, which will be cool.

[Cody]

That's awesome. I love that. That's. I mean, I can't. I'm really going to be curious. I'm going to have to text you after it's done because I'm curious, like, what those drive. Because I've always been curious about, like, dick sporting goods. Like, it's the mean you. They have that merch the night they win. It's there. Like, it's already stocked. I'm like, I bet you it's like this hockey stick for like four or five days. And then I just like, you know what I mean? On the world. On the championship stuff.

[Connor]

Dude, totally. I talked to Nate Lagos earlier, who used to work at Dugout Mug, so they had a big, like, World Series push, and he said, it's within minutes. Yeah. He was like, dude, you have to do it right after the game. Like, those first four hours, he's like, people are drunk. People are stoked. Like, that is when you want to be selling the merch.

[Cody]

We're going to be ready to go, so. Yeah, that's cool. Do you get it for super bowl.

[Connor]

Too, or do you get it for super bowl also?

[Cody]

You do. Okay.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Go Lions.

[Connor]

We got Go Lions. America's team. Awesome. Well, Dave, thanks so much for coming on. This was super fun.

[Cody]

Absolutely.

[Connor]

All right, that's a wrap. Thank you again for listening. Make sure to like like and subscribe. Share with your marketing friends. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel and prescient.